Bridgewater Associates has piled roughly half of its Assets into emerging markets ETFs.  While everyone else is concerned about an emerging markets slowdown, Dalio is getting more bullish.  Or it may be a diversification strategy away from Europe.  More interesting information is that Dalio is moving into Healthcare and financial stocks.  

You can find more info here - http://bit.ly/taIKyH

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In a contested bake-off with Larch Lane Advisors, Protege Partners was picked to manage the City of Richmond’s Hedge Fund Seeding Program.

More info is here http://bit.ly/oBW6nn

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More experienced and sophisticated Pension Funds  are frequently investing in hedge fund strategies directly rather than through Funds of Funds.  Consulting players like Albourne  Partners, Aksia and Cliffwater are winning a bevy of new business through projects requiring sophisticated analytical knowledge of the hedge fund market.  More here, http://bit.ly/nlQM9J

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 In this article Insch Invest make a detailed analysis of the performance and risks taken by asset managers in terms of their clients’ capital and their own revenues. Insch introduces two simple measures for evaluating managers’ performance: the Insch Ratio and the Insch Index. The Insch Ratio compares the revenues of clients to those of the manager, while the Insch Index compounds 1% p.a. Insch finds that a large number of traditional funds managed by banks fail to beat the Insch Index, and also to provide clients earnings above the size of management fees. Finally, Insch recommends asset managers to hedge their own revenues from the asset management business, endangered by market risk.

You can find more here, http://bit.ly/lDY4Ib

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Ron Suber, senior partner and global head of sales and marketing for Merlin Securities, recently shared his thoughts with IvyPlus about how managers can more effectively market their products and strategies to investors. Ron’s presentation addresses some of the key points made in Merlin’s two most recent white papers: “The Spectrum of Hedge Fund Investors” and “The Business of Running a Hedge Fund.”

So what are Ron’s recommendations for managers looking to get to the next level of AUM? Simple: have your business in order, know your investors and tell your story to them effectively.

The presentation is available at http://slidesha.re/gL9Gqn, and Ron’s white papers are posted at http://merlinsecurities.com/whitepapers.

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It’s a worst kept secret that alpha in hedge funds is frequently realized with smaller "emerging" managers as larger funds outgrow their strategy’s ability to generate non-correlated returns.   More institutional managers are acting on the realization that some of their larger funds have become more asset accumulators than alpha generators and are switching investment to emerging managers.  Calpers, NJ, NY and Illinois all have programs for emerging managers as does Duke University.  

PI Online reports that more institutional quality investors are taking deeper looks at emerging managers and their strategies to generate alpha.  

Albourne’s Richard Quigley says 

"We are seeing broad and significant interest in making increased allocations to emerging managers. Actual activity (i.e. funding) has been light, but we believe we are in the early innings”

Busara Advisors, a New York fund of funds received $150 million from a large California based pension fund.  

You can find out more here - http://bit.ly/jIoXpO

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The Wall Street Journal reports that hedge fund assets under management are nearly surpassing their 2008 highs in AUM.  Many other sources have reported that hedge funds have already passed their 2008 high of $2 trillion or predicted they would this year, the WSJ has jumped on board.  Differences in reporting may depend on how hedge funds are defined or which hedge fund database is being quoted.  More from the WSJ here, http://on.wsj.com/eg8X6r

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by Mark Wiggins, Senior Vice President, Research and Analytics – Europe, WNS Global Services

Outsourcing investment research activities to multi-skilled professionals, capable of generating insights on all elements at play in the market, has emerged as a smart alternative to meeting the challenges faced by investment management firms. Highly educated teams of desktop researchers help monitor trends, opportunities, threats, market-shifts and competitive moves. More importantly, they draw out implications for an investment management firm’s strategic direction, product portfolio, brand and evolution. Read on to find out what this trend can entail.

 http://www.wns.com/Insights/Articles/ArticleDetails/tabid/44237/entryid/440062/default.aspx

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Alumni of the Harvard endowment have surpassed Harvard’s endowment in Assets Under Management, outperforming their own benchmarks to date.  Much of the flight from Harvard was caused by a 2003 open alumni letter to Harvard’s then president, Larry Summers, about the extreme compensation of their managers.  Four years later, after several endowment staff left to form their own funds, Harvard’s endowment plummeted by 27%.  Total assets under management for the Crimson Cubs now exceeds $43 billion to Harvard’s current $27 billion.

"The class of ‘69 spent a lot of time arguing over tens of millions in compensation and ended up losing $10 billion,’’ said Steven Drobny, author of ‘‘The Invisible Hands: Hedge Funds Off the Record — Rethinking Real Money.’’

More at Bloomberg, http://bloom.bg/eC2ywb

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Merlin securities has released a new guideline to running a hedge fund.  Here is short synopsis, more at the jump.  

In an industry where just ten to fifteen years ago the general belief was that hedge funds all had a lifecycle and were not constructed to be long-term businesses, there has been a definite shift in attitude. Managers and investors alike today (post financial crisis) value firms that are built to last longer than the market cycles of their strategies. Merlin Securities points out in a new white paper, "Whereas pre-crisis the top hedge funds were dedicated to performance alpha, post-crisis the top funds also seek enterprise alpha."

You can find more here, http://www.finalternatives.com/node/15597

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